In last week’s post, we discussed the techniques and benefits of job analysis. This week we’ll discuss how to use the information gathered from job analysis to inform hiring decisions.
Create your “A-performer profile.”
Job analysis uncovers the desirable competencies of your ideal candidates. Using this information, you can develop a job profile that helps you determine the critical competencies for the targeted role and make more informed hiring decisions. Then you can tell if you found a match by evaluating candidates against the “A-performer profile” for that position. Not all your competencies are created equally. The specific competencies associated with successful performance in one type of job may differ from those in another. For example, Assertiveness and Sociability are critical to success in sales jobs, whereas Structure and Adaptability carry more weight in an administrative assistant’s effective performance.
Assess your candidates’ competencies.
After identifying the competencies required for success in a given job, use a pre-employment assessment that measures these competencies. You can use the assessment results to make hiring decisions based on the fit between the candidates and the job. If you are experiencing a surge in hiring or are involved in a high-volume hiring project, Berke job fit reports help you screen out candidates who do not meet your minimum standards, leaving only the suitable candidates to move on to an interview. If you have a limited applicant pool or plan to interview all your candidates, the detailed job fit reports provide valuable insight into how well the candidates match with the desirable ranges of competencies required in the job. Understanding the candidates’ strengths and areas for improvement help you identify the existing skill gaps, determine the training needs, and then take steps to address areas that need development.
Improve your interview.
When interviewing, use an interview guide to improve the quality of conversations and better understand the candidate’s competencies. Berke interview guides align with the job analysis and assessment results, helping you focus on the key competencies and ask behavioral based questions for each match and mismatch. As a bonus, the structured questions help you facilitate discussions and learn how to work with the candidates more effectively if they are hired.
More informed hiring decisions.
Hiring is too important to be left to our vague and subjective gut feeling. Job analysis and assessment data help you identify the best candidates for your organization. Job analysis is not just for large companies with abundant resources. With the right tools, small and medium-sized organizations can also implement a data-driven and well-thought-out process to increase their hiring success.
Berke offers three levels of job analysis (i.e., analyzing job forms, interviewing managers, and quantitatively evaluating incumbents’ competencies), each with varying degrees of customization. All options allow companies to compare candidate competencies against the competencies required of the job; the result is job fit rating, which helps you make more informed hiring decisions and select the best candidate for the job.
